We will not be intimidated

Security agents swooped on Sunday Standard offices and demanded that the newspaper’s editor Outsa Mokone should tell them where senior reporter Edgar Tsimane was. Mokone told them he was not Tsimane’s keeper, and quite rightly so. For what intelligent person comes asking a supervisor about the whereabouts of another grown up person with full and functional mental faculties? The security agents, apparently out of anger and in a bid to get Mokone to talk, arrested him.

They took him to Broadhurst Police Station where he was charged under some vague section of the Penal Code.  He was thrown into some smelly holding cell and denied the right to talk to his attorney Dick Bayford. Now, that is sacrilegious.  Nowhere in the democratised world do we hear about detained people being refused the right to an attorney. Yet, it happened in this country, touted as Africa’s shining example of democracy.